Tillamook Air Museum: The World's Largest Wooden Building

That enormous structure you may have spotted near Tillamook is Hangar B, among the largest wooden buildings in the world. The United States Navy built it in nineteen forty-two to house blimps for anti-submarine patrol along the Pacific coast. Eight K-class airships, each two hundred fifty-two feet long, operated from this base, escorting convoys and hunting for enemy submarines off the Oregon and Washington shores.

The hangar stretches over one thousand feet in length and required millions of board feet of lumber supplied by fifty different companies. A sister hangar, built even faster in just twenty-seven days, burned down in nineteen ninety-two. This one survived, and in nineteen ninety-four it reopened as the Tillamook Air Museum, now home to a remarkable collection of vintage military aircraft.

Inside, the scale of the wartime effort this building once housed becomes unmistakable.